A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

Is there any reason, then, to prefer one form of private organization over the other? Yes. While non-profit private schools have tended to increase the size of their waiting lists in response to growing demand, their for-profit counterparts have done what all commercial enterprises would do in that circumstance: they’ve grown.

If you want more good schools and fewer bad ones, make it easier for entrepreneurs and investors to team up with great educators, and let them earn profits or suffer losses in direct proportion to their ability to serve children.

At one time or another over the past two decades, most school choice supporters have felt like the subject of the “Friends” theme song; that it hasn’t been their day, their week, their month, or even their year.

Things are different now. For one thing, choice programs have proliferated and grown over time, more are being introduced this year than perhaps ever before. And for another, well, this IS their week: the first national School Choice Week.

Events are being held all over the country to celebrate the idea that families should be able to easily choose the best schools for their kids, and that schools should have to compete for the privilege of serving them.

Here at Cato’s Center for Educational Freedom, we’re dipping into the future to see what it holds. How are large scale public/private school choice programs working out in countries that have had them for two or three decades? To find out, we’ve invited the founder of the largest private school chain in Sweden and a Chilean economist researching his own nation’s program to share their experiences and findings on Friday at noon.

Given how alien for-profit k-12 schooling appears to most Americans, imagine the reaction Peje Emilsson got in 1999 when he proposed founding a chain of for-profit schools in Sweden. Already the founder of a multinational communications firm, Peje broached the idea with some of his nation’s top entrepreneurs and economists. If you’d like to find out what they had to say, and how his idea has turned out in practice, you won’t get another chance any time soon. Hope you can join us on Friday – to register for free, click here!

We all know there are too few good schools and too many lousy ones. The trouble is, we lack a mechanism for reliably scaling up the former and crowding out the latter. Competitive markets perform this service in other fields, from coffee-shops to cell phones. Can the same thing work in education?

To find out, we’ve invited experts from both hemispheres to tell us what their nations have learned from decades of experience with private-school choice. Peje Emilsson founded the largest chain of for-profit private schools in Sweden’s nationwide voucher program. Humberto Santos has studied the academic performance of public schools, independent private schools, and chains of private schools in Chile’s voucher program. Responding to their findings and asking challenging questions will be Education Week journalist Sarah Sparks.

I hope you can join us for this fascinating discussion, and lunch, at noon on January 28th. Click here to register. The sooner we can stop “Waiting for Superman,” the better.